Rackspace serves up training for OpenStack

Rackspace Hosting has launched a new training program for developers focused on the OpenStack open source cloud operating system. The program, part of Rackspace’s Cloud Builders initiative, will provide courses for OpenStack developers and administrators covering the fundamentals of setting up, administering and troubleshooting OpenStack clouds in a training lab environment.

“We have a lot of experts on OpenStack and people are hungry for that knowledge,” said Mark Collier, Rackspace’s VP of business development.

The company’s initial five-day training course, called Fundamentals Training for OpenStack, will be offered in Austin, Boston, London and San Antonio in 2011. Two days of the OpenStack fundamentals course will be focused on OpenStack Object Storage (open source software that can create petabytes of distributed storage), and three days will focus on OpenStack Compute (open source software used to provision and manage large networks of virtual machines). The course costs $3,000.

Rackspace, which offers cloud computing and managed hosting services, is a founder and contributor to OpenStack.

“We’re not trying to lock people in with technology—the fact that we’re a service company, not a software company, means we don’t have that inherent conflict,” Collier said. “The best way for us to accelerate the adoption of the cloud is to open source the cloud.”